A billionaire’s playground where British funds help to train the next
generation to wait on wealthy hotel guests.

Gathered around an urn full of hot water, a group of young waiting staff are polishing the cutlery until it gleams. Another team is laying the restaurant tables, while a manager picks up a wine glass, turning it in the sunlight to ensure that it is spotless. Little surprise: guests at Barbados’s hotels are among the most demanding in the world.

Yet this training establishment is not being run by one of the country’s many world-class hotels. It is paid for by you.

Students learn to polish glasses The PomMarine hotel (Geoff Pugh)

The European Union provided £1.8m to build an entire hotel and leisure complex, complete with golf course, in which to train 200 young people a year in hospitality management, baking technology and “culinary arts” in Barbados. Despite having one of the most sophisticated hotel industries in the world, Barbados asked the EU — whose aid budget is one-sixth funded by Britain’s Department for International Development (DfID) — to pay to train the next generation of sommeliers, chefs and maitres d’s at the Hotel PomMarine, on the south west coast of the island.

Welcome to the weird world of “international aid” in which millions of pounds in development funds can be spent training waiters in a country which nobody even pretends is poor.

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Barbados is, in terms of GDP per capita, wealthier than Portugal, Croatia and Hungary. Average life expectancy is 80 for women, and over 99 per cent of the population is literate.

In the UN Human Development Report for 2010, Barbados was listed among nations with a “very high” level of human development, officially a “developed” rather than a “developing” nation.

Indeed, the country has established itself as a billionaire’s playground, with the Sandy Lane hotel attracting the likes of Simon Cowell and Sir Philip Green. Coleen and Wayne Rooney have a house on the island, perhaps attracted by the arrival of Louis Vuitton and Cartier, just off Sunset Boulevard on Barbados’s wealthy west coast. The former British colony sees £36 billion in offshore finance pass through its doors each year.

Yet still the EU, DfID and a host of other development agencies pour money into this tiny Caribbean island of 280,000 people. From their offices overlooking the Caribbean, the EU staff dish out sizeable sums of money to projects focused on increasing agricultural productivity, tackling “climate change” and promoting renewable energy.

The cash has created a mini-industry for consultants. When the EU — or any other aid agency — has decided their projects, they will publish a “Request For Proposals”, inviting international consultants to bid for the project.

The use of international consultants has created a thriving cabal of highly-paid, globe-trotting specialists who flit from one project to the next. As The Sunday Telegraph revealed last week, these “poverty barons” can earn six-figure salaries for their work in countries such as Barbados, where they can be employed for several months at a time.

Large consultancy firms such as Deloitte and KPMG have their own offices in Barbados and other international consultants are keen to grab a slice of the pie. Some Caribbean consultants have even set up a “European office” — often little more than a small room in Paris or London — in order to gain an aura of international prestige, and help their bid for the contract.

Once the contract is signed, consultants can spend months, even years, investigating elements of Barbados’s society and economy.

Those working for the International Monetary Fund will check into the Hilton, with which the IMF has a worldwide deal, making it the favourite for other consultants too, and socialise at the Royal Westmoreland golf course, or Champers’ restaurant. There, say local critics, the aid deals are done.

“If I worked in this industry for 40 years, I could never break into that gang,” said Jeremy Stephen, a Barbadian business consultant. “Local firms are struggling to win contracts for development consultancy because there is this network of key individuals, who you see time and time again heading up the big projects.” Mr Stephen, who runs his own consultancy, said that using outsiders often resulted in projects that faded away without a proper legacy.

“A disproportionate amount is spent on consultants, and then two years down the line the project fails and everyone says it is due to lack of capitalisation. Well the money was there. But it was just not spent wisely.”

The wisdom of the spending is certainly an open question.

Despite Barbados’s burgeoning financial sector, the EU has allocated £800,000 in a “Budget Support Programme in support of the International Business and Financial Services Sector”.

A further £1 million has been spent on a forensic science laboratory. They also donated £3.1 million for the expansion of the Barbados language centre, which teaches Barbadians how to speak French, German or Chinese.

And one scheme is to modernise Andrew’s Sugar Factory, the oldest producer in a country built on sugar cane . Agricultural experts agree that the industry should have been modernised decades ago and in January 2010 the EU spent £960.000 million commissioning development consultants Landell Mills to investigate the crop and suggest ways of improving production. Their study is helping the Barbadian government increase productivity and produce more molasses — vital for rum production.

Most experts back the findings of the project, which is designed by the EU to help nations compete equally, once the World Trade Organisation removed preferential tariffs.

But even people who think the EU study was a good idea question whether employing outside consultants is the best way to enhance agricultural efficiency.

“Development agencies often come with a solution in need of a Caribbean problem,” said Keeley Holder, an agriculture consultant and president of the Barbados Society for Technologists in Agriculture.

“The people actually farming the land are excluded from the process, and the money never reaches them.”

One of the key figures in the aid world in Barbados, Dr Arnold McIntyre, project coordinator for financial services organisation CARTAC, is well aware of the heated debate around aid to Barbados.

CARTAC, funded primarily by Canada, with DfID contributing around £3.7 million for the period 2011-16, provides provide technical assistance for macro-economic policy, regulation, customs and tax in the Carribean - undeniably useful and well-run schemes. In Afghanistan, for example, improving the tax revenues would have a huge impact on the country. Does it really make such a difference in a developed nation like Barbados?

“In terms of the poverty impact, then that’s absolutely correct,” he said. “That’s why the IMF [which manages CARTAC] has four offices like ours in sub-Saharan Africa, and only one here for the entire Caribbean.” Dr McIntyre strongly denies that money sent to Barbados is ill-spent, and that their consultants — who earn an average base salary of £94,864 — are overpaid.

“Ten or 15 years ago, it was the case that the aid agencies were awash with cash, and perhaps spending it on crazy projects. But not any more,” he said.

“We are always criticised for how much consultants earn. But that is the market rate — indeed, often less, as consultants like working for the IMF and having that on their CV.

“We could offer £308 a day to consultants. But we would not get someone capable of doing the job.”